I’m playing. But I am cheating a little by reusing a What Works for Me Wednesday post as my Thoroughly Organized Thursday post too!
This is my third day using Google Reader and I still love it!
To see more ways to get organized, visit Lynn at Eclectic Education
Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in with? (pics)
created with QuizFarm.com
Ha! Pretty even for Serenity (love that show!!), Moya, and Millenium Falcon.
| Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in with? (pics) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| You scored as a Moya (Farscape) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| You are surrounded by muppets. But that is okay because they are your friends and have shown many times that they can be trusted. Now if only you could stop being bothered about wormholes. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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A link on a blog led me to SITS (Google Reader was also suggesting it, I’m liking Google Reader more and more). The concept is comments on blogs. Here’s how they describe themselves on the Welcome Page.
Welcome to the Sitstahood! We are a group of bloggers dedicated to supporting one another by leaving comments. Lots and lots of comments.
I’ve added the button and posted on SITS and a few of the blogs they linked to today. Check it out!
The Homeschool Blog Awards Memoir entry for today is routines.
HA!
Ha Ha Ha! I say
I do have a schedule that I set up in HST Plus. We haven’t gotten into that routine yet. I’m still working to convince him he has to actually sit and do work and put more thought into what he’s doing. He reads well and gets the point quickly so then he figures he can walk off. Where is his teacher?!?
It’s working out to be math, grammar, writing, history, science, logic, and Bible reading every day. Vocabulary 3 or 4 days for a short time. With lots of reading in there. He thinks there should be a lot more time each day dedicated to playing video games.
The good thing is he makes his own lunch.
http://homeschoolblogawards.com/2008/09/homeschool-memoirs-3-routines/#mce_temp_url# to see what others are doing.
I don’t know if I’ll come up with a Wordless Wednesday this week. But I do have a What Works for Me. It also counts as a Thursday Timesaver so I’m covering 2 days of the week this way.
As I hang around the Well Trained Mind forum and go nosing around for Homeschool stuff, I have come across a ton of blogs that I like to keep up with. My bookmarks folder in Firefox for blogs has gotten quite full and it is now a chore to check each one during the week to see who has updated their blog. Of course, I could subscribe to each blog (at least most of them offer that option) but I don’t want it coming into my mailbox. I am a clean inbox type and the pressure of all those emails would adversely affect me. I mentioned this to Anthony and he recommended the Google Reader. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to use it and warm up to it. I still could make some aesthetic recommendations, but in general I like the functionality. At first I was concerned when it asked for the user name for the blog (that isn’t always obvious). But I finally just tried pasting in the url and that worked. So, I did that 61 times. Today I was able to easily see what blog entries I had not read and catch up right there in the reader. I can click on the blog entry and it opens a new tab with the blog up so I can add comments, read comments, etc…
Now you know, it’s what works for me.
Whee, homework mostly done, study group went well. Work is through until tomorrow.
Let me catch up on my blogging while I can.
We started last week. I had a couple of plans through the summer. Start him right in and keep him busy so he doesn’t have time to play video games all day, but we’d finish all my material by January. Or start him slow and easy to “handle” the public school detox that people talk about (no idea what this looks like or how to handle it). Some even suggest doing something non-schooly on the first day to clearly state this homeschooling is different. Then Mom wanted to take him for the week after Labor Day so I decided we’d start easy and then I could easily control the school work he had to do while at Mom’s. That made for a slow and uneventful first week.
He did chapter 1 in Vocabulary, read the first 4 summary pages of Kingfisher, finished the first 2 writing assignments (poems with creative adjectives and verbs), and read most of Gen 1-20 with a family tree of Abraham thrown in. He also completed the first 3 lessons for Life of Fred Algebra (so far I know all the answers). He explored the Encyclopedia Britannica DVD and started creating his Timeline notebook. He also read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and figured out that the meaning of life is 42.
I am loving Homeschool Tracker Plus. At the beginning of the week I just print out his assignments for those 5 days. Then as he hands in homework and I grade it, I just enter in the total points and how many he got, and it figures up his grade for me.
Then Mom got a job (that’s cause for celebration)!
That means he’s here this week instead of there. Today was ‘kind’ of slow – he has way more work to do this week, but he just did the mental preparation for it. Evidence will appear tomorrow. Today and tomorrow he will correct his vocab and math homework from last week, he will do his 3rd writing assignment (a paragraph on Ziggurats), write a page on Gilgamesh (he read it today), do lessons 4-7 in Life of Fred, memorize the 50 prepositions in Easy Grammar, outline his Bible reading from last week and this week, and write 2 more essays on topics from pages 8-9 in Kingfisher (Sumer, etc., including ziggurats). Today he also read the Calliope issue that talked about that time period. He quickly detected the pattern of all the subject matter. He’ll notice I did just as much work when we move onto Egypt next 😉
For free reading today he decided that A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was too hard for him (maybe we’ll read it out loud together), so I told him to pick up Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. He read 4 chapters of that and then headed off to play the game he got for his birthday.
That was fine since I had to get my own homework done. Tomorrow should be good.
I need to post an update about our first week of homeschool. And I have plenty to share from our fun Labor Day weekend.
I also need to finish my homework before my study group meets tonight, vacuum, and do some grocery shopping before breakfast tomorrow, plus the workday isn’t quite done. I feel way behind, mainly because I had a great Labor Day weekend and didn’t do any homework or housework at all.
So, what am I going to blog about? Well, Heidi over at Mt Hope Chronicles posted a few questions for us in her blog entry today (since she also doesn’t have time for a deep blog entry either) so I am going to answer a few of them and get back to work, and then on to my homework.
::Name one place you would like to see before you die.
I’ve seen some of Europe, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Saigon, Dubai, Cairo, Mexico, and a fair amount of the US (mainly eastern). I would like to see the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls. I also have a romantic idea of seeing Victoria Falls and some of Africa some day.
::Is there a foreign language you wish you knew or would like to learn?
I enjoy speaking some Spanish, have dabbled in Italian, French, and Portuguese, and even looked at German, Latin and Greek. I am not real interested in languages with completely different alphabets or symbols like Russian, Chinese, or Arabic. I think I’ll stick with wanting proficiency in Spanish.
::What do you think your mom would say was the biggest challenge you presented her with?
My moodiness and tendency to cry is first to mind. I was a rule-follower, but I could be stubborn about getting my way (that red-head temper).
I recognize this. I’m reading White Oleander by Janet Fitch right now (got it for $0.25 at the library) and it is full of loneliness. I am so glad I’m surrounded by family and friends this week or the book would do me in. I will need something brighter to lift me out of this when I’m done.
We in the southeast have been experiencing a drought for a few years now. We are happy to get any rain. Tropical Storm Fay, after her triple-whammy to Florida, headed inland and we’ve been getting rain since mid-day Monday. Yesterday was significant. The rain last night was very heavy and relentless. We have an easement along the side of the house. When they built the house they narrowed the easement to give us more yard. While that was sweet of them, it didn’t have enough room for the amount of water that a rain storm sends our way. We asked politely and made some noise and they finally agreed to rework the easement to make it deeper and wider. It’s a good thing, because at 4am we looked out and the water was deep and wide rushing down the easemeant. But it was all in the easement, which is a good thing.
Why were we looking at the easement at 4am, you ask? Excellent question! The other water-related problem we had with the house 2 years ago (we moved in 3 years ago, where does the time go) was a leak around the flashing that was improperly put around the chimney. That time during the afternoon I heard water dripping in the bedroom and found it behind the a/c intake vent. This time the fire alarm started chirping at 3:40am and wouldn’t stop. Anthony said it wasn’t the low battery sound, but since it was not going to stop we finally got up and pulled out our extra tall ladder to get it down. Glad we have that ladder, toolman wins this argument, I don’t have any friends I hate enough to ask to borrow a ladder at 4am. While we were doing this I noticed a small stream of water coming down the wall by the light switch. Then I noticed water on the back of the fire alarm (that explains the chirping).
Did I mention that the attic area with the chimney has a door to it from the upper hallway? It’s just a small area with lots of insulation, so we logically put a bookcase in front of it and loaded it up with books. I guess if we have to empty and move the bookcase only every 2 years I shouldn’t complain, but at 4am I wasn’t thrilled to be moving books. Especially since it was a small stream and I wasn’t sure what we would do at 4am. Anthony imagined a bucket catching steady drops of water. I’m not sure we own a bucket, I guess I would have found something.
Anyway, no drops to catch in the attic. Then the rain stopped and the trickle down the wall dried up. We’ll start with the builder and see what we end up doing about the leak. At least we can be sure that’s the only place we have a leak!
Of course, the nephew slept through all of this. Sometimes ignorance truly is bliss.
